Metro 2033 EP3: Stealth Revolver

By Shamus Posted Friday Oct 11, 2013

Filed under: Spoiler Warning 75 comments


Link (YouTube)

I like how the second half of the episode is faithful to the books in that there are no visuals. This is the first place I noticed a kind of conflict within the game: Fighting “monsters” in the dark is great for the atmosphere and story, but fighting humans makes for more interesting gameplay.

At the twelve minute mark: See? THIS is why we shouldn’t take random manhole covers and use them as tables back in town.

 


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75 thoughts on “Metro 2033 EP3: Stealth Revolver

  1. Bagrick says:

    Good episode ;)

    I’m enjoying this season more then last season’s Tomb Raider.

  2. Spongioblast says:

    Can’t comment on the railgun thing but the air pump gun is very good if you over charge it and fight from stealth. Solid one hit kills more often then not if you aim for the gap in between armor.

    1. Sabredance (MatthewH) says:

      I never used it much, but the first time Artyom goes outside, I picked up a scoped pnuemo which made sniping Nosalis a lot easier -no noise to attract the pack. I think the silence is the real benefit, especially if you can hit that sweet spot just above the neck.

    2. Kana says:

      I had the railgun in my play-through of the game. Unless they changed it, the railgun at a full charge is the single most damaging gun in the entire game. You can 1 or 2 shot anything. It also makes enough noise to alert the entire bloody metro and has to be pumped all the time to keep it at the ludicrous damage levels.

      You can also smack people with the battery and shock ’em. Hilarious, if ineffective.

  3. ChoppazAndDakka says:

    The ball bearing gun isn’t very good in my experience, but the pneumatic bow gun is amazing on levels where you deal with human enemies. It makes no noise and fully pumped is usually an instant kill. I made sure to get one with a scope before hitting the Red line.

    1. Sabredance (MatthewH) says:

      Maybe I should’ve done that. I shelled out for the silenced SVD and never had enough money to upgrade to the heavy armor at Polis. Let me tell you how hard it is to sneak up the tower at the end of the game…

    2. broken says:

      the Hellsing (the pneumatic crossbow) will kill the enemies in the Library in 1-2 hits when fully (over)charged. It is a BEAST of a weapon.

  4. Thomas says:

    I’m really beginning to look forward to the rest of the season, it looks like this is a really interesting game that I never want to play. Which will be a new SW combination for me

    1. X2Eliah says:

      Aye, same here. I’m genuinely interested in this season.

  5. Zerotime says:

    The Nagant M1895 revolver actually is capable of being silenced – basically, when it’s cocked, the cylinder moves forward and seals against the barrel. There’s also the OTS-38, but that uses silent ammo instead of a suppressor.

    1. ? says:

      I wanted to bring up Nagant (it is Russian after all) but it had 7-round cylinder, and in game one has 6.

      Also, yes, every military uses ‘incendiary ammo’, known as tracer ammo, it just doesn’t work in real life as it does in video games (since humans are not really combustible). It can set highly flammable things on fire, but it’s really used to see where machine-gun is firing and to correct your aim.

    2. Rutskarn says:

      I saw this point on a wiki after the episode, but as the wiki points out, the model in the game actually lacks the gas-seal feature. So while there is a nominal justification, it’s still kinda weird.

    3. cavalier says:

      But for some reason that’s not the revolver the designers included. It’s a .44 Magnum; hardly a common round in Russia.

      1. KremlinLaptop says:

        To be honest the reason for not having the Nagant becomes infinitely clear when you begin unloading the gun after firing off your shots:

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J43EukqE4UI

        Not exactly a great action game mechanic. It’s a pity because other than that the Nagant is a wonderfully robust little gun.

        Edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvF4yurWSc0 I mean look at that! That’s just strange — a silenced revolver!? Outrageous, but so cool.

        1. anaphysik says:

          Nonsense. Old-school loading gates seem perfect for a survival-themed game. (Though it seems that Metro demands a lot more action than I thought it would.)

    4. “Phooey! Plan to steal silent bullets, codename ‘hush-a-bang,’ foiled again by Moose and Squirrel!”

  6. jarppi says:

    Those ball bearing guns were situationally the most effective guns in the game… The volt driver is just ridiculously powerful and tihar is a perfect stealth gun. Ammo is also cheap, if I remember it right it was 1:8 at buying and 16:1 when selling. The fact that you need to reload them for both ammo and ‘energy’ makes them useless only against a horde of mutants.

  7. Mersadeon says:

    What I really didn’t enjoy is that there was NO indication that I would suddenly have need of the pneumatic stealth gun. I was carrying around a shotgun for dealing with those monsters, and suddenly comes a level where starting a fight is really not the right way to go. I had to restart the chapter to buy a different gun.

    1. ET says:

      The really unfortunate thing is that there is basically no reason to have a non-stealth gun in these games.
      There might be some damage difference between stealth and non-stealth, but since stealth kills against humans are always headshots, this doesn’t matter.
      Mutants are never stealth kills, but since they rush you pretty much in a straight line, you have a decent chance of shooting them in the head too.
      And if you ever get rushed by enough mutants that you need more deeps than the single-shot silenced guns dish out…then there’s the silenced version of the automatic guns. :|

      1. Venalitor says:

        I don’t know, non-stealth works pretty well for getting them to run around like chickens with their heads cut off, and being easy prey. Then again, once I got to the red-line and the enemies stopped dropping with one knife I was pretty well out of ideas. But yet again, I almost never stopped using the VOLT-DRIIIVAAAAAR (picture Jack Black yelling that) with its one hit killiness and laser-sight. I just don’t see the use for stealth in 2033, but Last-Light on the other hand. . .

        barely noticed it has guns.

  8. Sabredance (MatthewH) says:

    The only way I could get through this room was by dying a lot. Eventually I worked out a pattern -which I don’t really remember, but it was like:

    Bourbon opens the door. 5 beats. Throw knife, knife intercepts bandit just as we walks into room. 20 steps across the room, search bandit as you move. Turn left and aim at the crossbeam on the box. 10 beats. Patrolling bandit crossed the right-most edge of the box. Throw knife -knife intercepts bandit. Search bandit, relocate to box with light on it. stab bandit leaning against box. Sneak past center group, spot 2 bandits in back. Throw knife at near bandit, immediately switch to grenade and lob it back into the firepit. Switch to SMG and kill the last guard by the exit. Take cover and hope Bourbon got out of his hole and cleaned up the last of the Bandits when they rant from the grenade.

    Search bodies.

    Then the last part in the hall was just a matter of shooting lots of SMG rounds down range.

    1. el_b says:

      I love the body searching mechanics in this game. I was really disappointed that they changed it in the second. it really made you Pay a lot of attention to what you were doing, and make you more tense about being caught. I’m pretty sure no one else has ever done it either and it was probably the first technique used to make enemies look unique before bulletstorm procedurally generated enemies. it’s essentially the fallout 3 system but it doesn’t pause the game, I’m surprised it took so long for someone to try it.

  9. aldowyn says:

    I think this first fight with the bandits is where I quit. The stealth was ridiculous, and as has been mentioned before the difficulty is weird.

  10. Decius says:

    It took me forever, but I managed to pick off everybody except the group around the fire without the alarm being raised.

    I love that the various armor is functional, in that knives and even bullets have less effect if they hit armor. It’s comical at times when I see that someone has an armored vest and helmet, so I throw a knife at their leg and they drop like a rock.

    The scoped pneumatic is great for stealthy people, but it precludes carrying a shotgun.

    And the throwing knives are way overpowered. To the point that in the library I used them exclusively, simply because the semi-auto shotgun and assault rifle didn’t have enough stopping power.

  11. Disc says:

    16:40 I like how getting shot and stabbed rewards you with “You died by coming into contact with an anomaly.” The advice is equally absurd in the context: “Be sure to keep your distance and stand still when it comes near.”

  12. Raygereio says:

    The stealth in this game is terrible. Due to the lack of gameplay tools supporting that playstyle it ends up being one big trial-and-error affair. Which combined with the checkpoint based save system is a recipe for frustration.
    Luckily, stealth is also wholly optional. It’s perfectly possible to just rambo through all the sections that game plays up as stealth oriented.

    Also, at the 23 min mark Josh pointed to the Volt Driver – this game’s railgun – and he and Shamus claimed it was crap.
    I’m kinda curious how you used the thing, because it’s easily one of the best guns in the game for me. The thing is highly accurate, does ludicrous damage and uses very cheap ammo.

    1. Josh says:

      What can I say? I like having a shotgun more.

      High damage is somewhat less important than rate of fire on ranger difficulties. And by the time it does become important (around the Library, depending on how you play it/how lucky you are at not pissing off the librarians) I’ll have had the heavy automatic shotgun for many levels, whose utility significantly outstrips any advantages the volt driver might have, aside from ammunition cost.

      But compared to even the normal automatic shotgun (the one with a 5-shell revolver style belt) the volt driver has: A) a much lower rate of fire, which is exacerbated by B) a significantly longer reload time, given you have to constantly charge the thing or its high damage falls off.

      I always use my shotgun slot for engaging monsters, which is much more about dispatching enemies quickly because you often get swarmed. Which is why I don’t like any of the non-shotgun options. Most of them are better for attacking humans, but a silenced main weapon + revolver is significantly better than any of them for that purpose.

      1. Raygereio says:

        What can I say? I like having a shotgun more.

        Fair enough.
        I actually felt the shotguns in this game were really underwhelming, they just didn’t seem kill things fast enough for me to justify getting up close to the monsters and weren’t that fun to use.
        I ended up using the Volt Driver for when I wanted stuff dead fast and an assault rifle for when I needed a high fire rate.

      2. Michael says:

        The revolver shotguns are, actually, six shot, they’re just a pain to fully load because Artyum can’t get at one of the cylinders when the shotgun’s empty. If you reload one from empty, then reload again after firing a shot, he’ll clip two shells to it.

  13. McNutcase says:

    You’re now more than an episode after the point at which I couldn’t handle it any more, and so far it looks like I quit just before it got frustrating.

    Josh, when you have enemies of indeterminate location, that’s when you use stereo pan to get looking straight at them, and then you use this handy device called a grenade. You have several, I’ve noticed. They tend to get unseen enemies to move around. Sometimes even of their own volition, rather than as a shrapnel-ridden ragdoll.

    1. Josh says:

      Unfortunately I have game audio in one ear and voiceover audio in the other when I’m playing, so figuring out where the enemy is with sound is basically impossible.

      1. Dovius says:

        Are you still wearing 2 headsets for that, or have you found an easier way since the time when your Spoiler Warning recording rig was described in one of the posts?

        1. Josh says:

          Still two headsets. I’m not sure there’s an easier way to do it.

          1. Kelmomas says:

            Maybe just go the hardware route? I.e. buy the cheapest, simplest, shittiest mixer you can find online (since you literally just need to mix two stereo channels into one and nothing else). Quick look at eBay shows me some for 10-20 euros, so you can probably find something similarly cheap across the pond.

            1. Peter H. Coffin says:

              $20. http://is.gd/x6BbKv (amazon link) Plus about 5-8 bucks for a couple of adapters to change the plug size to 1/4″ and some cords.

              (edit: wrong link)

        2. anaphysik says:

          ‘Two headsets, two computers’ is how Aldowyn does it as well, IIRC (it’s off somewhen in the distant past, so it’s a bit tough to recall). Although I keep trying to convince him to wear on-ear phones for one application and over-ear phones (over the on-ear ones) for the other, I /think/ he does one-over-one-ear-one-on-the-other like Josh.

  14. Daemian Lucifer says:

    You think a silenced revolver is weird?The second game offers a silenced shotgun.

    1. Canthros says:

      But … you can silence a shotgun. They exist. I want to say most extant examples tap the barrel at multiple points and build the expansion chambers of the suppressor around the barrel (so, no, it’s not like in “No Country for Old Men”), but it’s a thing that is real.

      I want to say the US Army experimented with silencing revolvers (Colts and Smiths) during the Vietnam era. The result was a thing that clamshelled around almost the whole gun, which made it kind of impractical to haul around and almost impossible to reload.

      1. Michael says:

        I could have sworn there was an American suppressed revolver back around 1946, but it may have just been a reverse engineered Nagant.

        It looks like the Vietnam era research resulted in a silenced S&W semiautomatic.

        To be fair, “suppressed” and “silenced” aren’t completely synonymous, so it could be we’re both right.

        1. Daemian Lucifer says:

          Also,lets keep in mind that the game operates with fictional silencers that make every weapon you fire completely silent,even more silent that stepping on broken glass.

          1. ET says:

            In the second game, enemies ignore the sound of broken glass!
            Which…basically made the stealth even easier. :|

          2. Michael says:

            Which is really weird to me, because these are some of the same devs that made the original STALKER, and its rather noisy suppressors.

      2. Postal 2 had a silencer for your shotgun.

        If you don’t know what it was, don’t look it up.

  15. guy says:

    I love how you were all so distracted by the silenced revolver that you failed to notice the bastard gun for sale was also silenced.

    Granted, people do silence submachine guns, but the idea of doing it to one of those pieces of junk is ludicrous. The rattling of the mechanisms would probably give your position away just fine without any noise from the gunshot whatsoever

    1. hborrgg says:

      If I remember correctly, at least in Last Light, it’s not really that much of a submachinegun at least in that it uses the same ammo as the AK and other assault rifles. I don’t think the bullets changed much damage-wise gun to gun either so the bastard had basically the highest close range dps in the game due to its rate of fire.

  16. hborrgg says:

    I love how you all instantly stopped talking as the game froze.

    1. Hitchmeister says:

      Probably force of habit at this point. Anything said during a game freeze tends to get edited out of the show so if they say anything interesting it’s wasted. Instead, they just wait for things to get straightened out.

      1. Except all the hosts except Josh are on a 5 second delay, so by the time the others had seen it, it had already fixed itself. So, it’s more likely to be happenstance than intentional silence.

    2. somniorum says:

      My computer’s been occasionally freezing lately, so I genuinely thought I’d frozen at first… was so relieved when Josh FINALLY started talking again.

  17. StashAugustine says:

    Stealth Revolver sounds like a Metal Gear villain.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Really? It sounds to me like what Ranger Hardcore is packing…

      1. Lovecrafter says:

        Ranger Hardcore does not sound like the kind of person who’d pack anything stealthy whatsoever.

        1. Michael says:

          He carries a S&W .500 that he calls “Stealth Revolver.” :p

  18. I’m amazed that we’ve gone three episodes with Rutz doing his accent without a reference to the infamous level from Call of Duty, “No Rutskarn.”

    Also, the word “wanker” at 20:22 really sounds strange in a Russian accent.

  19. MrGuy says:

    I love that mere moments after “let Borbon show you how it’s done!” bravado, Bourbon elects to spend the entirety of the second fight sitting in the corner sucking his thumb while you fight an entire gang. As far as I’ve seen, he won’t so much as come out of cover to shoot a guy if you happen to drag one into his field of fire.

    Seriously, what happened to that guy in the 15 seconds since the last encounter? I have no issues having to fight a bunch of dudes, and I’m kind of glad not having the AI trip over me in a stealth section. But seriously? He couldn’t be picking a lock or setting a trap or guarding the rear door or ANYTHING else to keep him occupied without being 100% useless?

    1. I’d say that’s really well-coded AI to recognize what kind of team-killing bastard Josh often is. It probably got a look at the raw files from the Fallout 3 playthrough, especially the ones from Broken Steel, and decided, “nyet.”

      1. Hitchmeister says:

        “I do not have enough bullets to guarantee this mercenary’s loyalty.”

        In any sense of the word.

        1. Ilseroth says:

          He’s not a mercenary!

  20. anaphysik says:

    The woman at the bar looked different to me. Different colour hair and no black eyeliner, at the very least (though hair asset and face looked different as well; that could just be my eyes).

    Plus, you know, she was wearing /actual adventuring clothes/.

    It also looked like there was a black-haired woman at one of the tables behind your drinking partners, though that could have been a guy. Additionally, there was definitely a lady with a different body asset/texture later (an older woman, stirring something in a pot behind where Bourbon was sitting). Someone who’s played the game could do a more proper count, but I feel like you guys just weren’t looking carefully/closely enough :/ (Haven’t played the game myself, so I just have to rely on what I can catch while watching the episode.)

    Also: it’s nice to see a bunch of kids around, too. Extra points for not making them annoying or cloying. (The kid drawing on the ground and the kid who acts as a guide both seem very well done.)

    1. somniorum says:

      There were at least some other women around there – Josh actually started mentioning someone else he’d seen, but he got kinda cut off/ignored.

      The unfortunate thing is that *none* of them are even vaguely important.

  21. Spammy says:

    I didn’t use the Volt Driver my first game because I assumed it would be just an annoying fiddly mess. I tried to use the Helsing once and immediately dropped it, because I thought the tank leaked and didn’t hold any pressure so you’d have to pump it before each shot.

    But the Volt Driver is great, actually. When it’s fully charged one shot will drop the mutants on the surface in the next level. If you don’t want to use ammo against the mutants the alt-fire is just using it as a stun prod and it’s pretty effective.

    So… basically ignore all the pneumatic weapons, rock the Volt Driver.

    1. PeteTimesSix says:

      I agree, the Volt Driver is great.

      It sells for like, 80 bullets! Got me my stealth suit with that money.

      (I did not like the idea of a railgun in my otherwise cobbled-together terribly maintained barely functional arsenal.)

  22. RE: knives:

    You could aim for their backs. It would knock the wind right out of them. The most noise you would make would be a small cough.

    1. Ben Hilton says:

      But again this is assuming they die instantly, otherwise they will just breathe in again and then start yelling.

      1. I never said they would die instantly, but they will go down quietly. It’ll hurt too much to breath and I think their lungs will more than likely start filling up with blood.

        But now that I think of it, that’s probably the least of your worries. The sound of the body falling over (not to mention the gun, if they’re holding one) would definitely be amplified on those close tunnels. We’re just not dealing with a good knife throwing situation. It would be better to just come up from behind with a knife, stab them/cut their throat, then gently guide the body to the ground.

  23. hborrgg says:

    @15:00

    Oh wow, the booby trap tutorial looks way better in this game. From what I remember, Last Light just has you rush down a dark hallway over and over again until you realize “oh hey, there are explosive booby traps in this game that I should watch out for.”

    1. MrGuy says:

      Though as Josh demonstrated earlier in the episode, there’s no corresponding “holes kill you” tutorial – it can take a few tries to realize the thing that killed you wasn’t some unseen enemy…

    2. GM says:

      i never did figure out how to defang them other than the first trap.

  24. Alex says:

    Hold on; this is a setting where money literally equals firepower, and the prostitute thinks this is a good con?

    1. GM says:

      I have a question ,what prostitute?

      1. Alex says:

        The one mentioned in the video, the one with the friend who mugs you if you try to solicit her.

  25. Ben Hilton says:

    I believe they are all drinking Svedka in the bar because according to their slogan it is the #1 vodka of 2033.

    1. MrGuy says:

      Svedka–it tastes just like it was brewed from mushrooms in a filthy subway station!

      I think you may be on to something here…

  26. somniorum says:

    12:38 – Notice Josh ALMOST fall into another hole : P He would’ve if he’d been moving slower.

    1. postinternetsyndrome says:

      Yes, I flipped at that too.

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